On the Spatial Turn, or Horizontal Art History1
Piotr Piotrowski — uniwersytet im. adama mickiewicza, poznań
ART SINCE 1900, a study published recently by sev-
eral prominent art historians connected with the Octo-
ber quarterly, is definitely one of the best available
overviews of twentieth-century art.2 The considerable
amount of artistic material covered in the book has
been ordered chronologically decade by decade, with
each year covered in terms of major events. These are
presented not so much as separate incidents, but rather
as aspects of the intellectual processes that were char-
acteristic of a given period. On several occasions the
historical narrative has been interrupted by the authors’
‘round table’ debates. The analyses relies on the latest
methods of research, in many cases elaborated by the
authors themselves. Each segment of the book, moreo-
ver, has been supplemented by an appropriate reading
list and references to the other sections. This offers
the reader a chance to follow specific artistic processes,
series of events, and the evolution of individual artists
‘above,’ as it were, the subsequent narrative pieces. The
book closes with a glossary of twentieth-century art,
an index, and an enormous bibliography. All in all, Art
since 1900 is an excellent academic textbook, virtually
indispensable for study of twentieth-century art. It is
perfectly clear and written in the current idiom of art
history. The question I am going to ask here pertains,
however, to geography.
There is absolutely no doubt that Art since 1900 is
a textbook focusing on Western art – the art produced
in the cultural and political centers of the West: Paris,
Berlin, Vienna, London, New York and others. This does
not mean, however, that it does not mention any exam-
ples of art created outside the West or on its periphe-
ry. Apart from Russia and the role of Moscow and St.
Petersburg (or Petrograd), the reader will find in the
book information on the selected problems of twentie-
th-century art in Brazil, Mexico and Japan, as well as in
Central Europe. It is perhaps the first publication with
such a wide scope, expanding the artistic geography of
the last century. This is particularly important since the
book is intended as an academic textbook. The problem
is that it does not revise the tacit assumptions of the
modernist artistic geography. It ignores the perspective
of critical geography, as well as what Thomas DaCosta
Kaufmann calls ‘geohistory.’3 It thereby fails to reveal
the historical significance of the space and place where
specific art is actually produced. In other words, Art
Since 1900 refuses to deconstruct the relations between
the center and the periphery of the world history of
modern art. The group of art historians to which the
authors of the book once belonged has done much to
revise the paradigm of art-history studies, founding
their project of a critical art history on the inspirations
drawn from social sciences, feminism, queer theory,
etc. Still, the authors of Art Since 1900 made no attempt
378 u m ě n í LV I/2 0 0 8
to critique the modernist artistic geography, nor did
they revise its premises according to their own critical
methodology. Consequently, the accounts of art pro-
duced outside the centers in Western Europe and the
United States have been written within the Western
paradigm. In this context, an exception has been made
in the case of Russia. Its influence on the development
of the international (Western) avant-garde cannot be
overstated and its role has been distinctly highlighted
in the book. This is, however, nothing new. The history
of the first great Russian avant-garde has been part
of the Western canon of twentieth-century art at least
since the time of Alfred Barr. Its inclusion in any histo-
rical narrative is not so much an innovation as a basic
obligation. What is really significant is the presentati-
on of the art of other regions as fragments of the global
or universal art history established in the West. This
reveals both the West-centric approach to art history
and the premises of modernist art geography.
I call this type of art-history narrative ‘vertical.’
First of all, it implies a certain hierarchy. The heart
of modern art is the center – a city or cities – where
the paradigms of the main artistic trends come into
being: Berlin, Paris, New York and other cities of the
West. From those centers particular models move to
the periphery, radiating all over the world. Hence, the
art of the center determines the specific paradigms,
while the art of the periphery is supposed to adopt the
models established in the center. The center provides
the canons, the hierarchy of values and the stylistic
norms; it is the role of the periphery to adopt them in
the process of reception. It may happen, of course, that
the periphery has its own outstanding artists, but their
recognition, their consecration in art history, depends
on the center: on the exhibitions organized in the West
and the books published in Western countries. That
was what happened to the outstanding Polish construc-
tivists Katarzyna Kobro and Władysław Strzemiński,
and to Czech surrealists such as Toyen and Jindřich
Štyrský. Naturally, their contemporaries recognized
them as peers. For instance, in his lecture delivered in
Prague on 29 March 1935, André Breton said that sur-
realism was developing in Paris and in Prague in two
parallel ways.4 The artists of the international avant-
-garde did not view the artistic scene from a vertical
perspective: to the Dadaists, Bucharest and Tokyo were
just as important as Berlin and Zurich. It was art his-
tory that developed the hierarchical, vertical discourse
ordering artistic geography in terms of center and peri-
phery. On the subject of Dadaism, let me mention the
extensive, excellent history edited by Stephen Foster:
volume four provides information on art outside the
(Western) centers. The title of volume four is telling:
The Eastern Dada Orbit. There one finds accounts of the
 Piotr Piotrowski . ON THE SPATIAL TURN, OR HORIZONTAL ART HISTORY
Dada movement in Eastern and Central Europe, as well
as in Japan.5 It is also rather striking that whatever is
outside the center is ‘Eastern,’ with the East stretching
from Prague to Tokyo. Apparently then, vertical art his-
tory implies an ‘orientalization’ of the culture of Others
in the sense proposed by Edward Said.6
Still, to launch a critique of the ‘vertical’ program
of art history is not that easy. Of course, there are many
publications devoted to art produced outside the Wes-
tern artistic centers – in Central Europe, South Ameri-
ca or Asia – and many of them in one way or another
deal with the methodological problems concerning the
relations between East and West, or North and South.
The real problem, however, persists on a much deeper
level: is there non-Western modern art, and if so, what
is its mode of existence? Modernism and its ‘muta-
tions’ – antimodernism and postmodernism – were
by definition Western. This means, in the modernist
sense,that they carried so-called ‘universal’ meaning:
Igor Zabel claims that the modern forms and values
of art are Western and as such pretend to be univer-
sal.7 Nevertheless, these forms and values functioned
not only in the West and North, but also in the East
and South. Thus, when we ask about ‘world art his-
tory’, we must repeat a question posed quite recently
by Suzana Milevska: can such art history exist at all
outside the aforementioned geographical dichotomies?8
It certainly cannot. Cultural asymmetry is not just an
oversimplification, but an instrument of domination
by cultural centers. (In his article ‘The Marco Polo
Syndrome,’ Gerardo Mosquera critiqued the concept of
cultural asymmetry, which is founded on a belief that
the West provides models that the rest of the world
either adopts or consigns to ethnographic museums as
‘traditional’ or ‘exotic’.9). It is obvious that in the colo-
nized regions art developed by drawing on the models
of the metropolis. To the scholars who research the
subject, however, it is equally obvious that that art goes
beyond mere adoption and imitation, as well as beyond
mere ‘completion’ of the art defined by the centers of
modernism.
One of the most successful attempts to address
this problem looking at a large non-Western area rather
than a single case study is John Clark’s Modern Asian
Art.10 Clark has drawn a detailed picture of modern art
in Asia in relation to the culture of the West, which he
calls ‘Euramerica,’ highlighting the ignorance of his
subject matter in the West. The variety that we see
in his book stems not only from the different cultural
policies of different countries, but also from the much
more profound cultural processes going on in various
locations. In fact, Clark claims, the ‘Euramerican’ influ-
ence is only one element that a historian of the region
must take into consideration. Another element is the
inner dynamic of a given culture and its selective need
to adopt specific models, and the role played by cultural
‘transfers’ in particular countries. In other words, Clark
is interested not so much in the reflection of Western
modern art in Asia, but rather in the function of that
art and its institutions in a given Asian context. His is
thus a much more dynamic interpretation of the recep-
tion of modern art in Asia than the ones we usually
encounter in Western art-history textbooks: the artist,
the work and the culture of a given country are, accor-
ding to Clark, ‘actors’ rather than ‘fields’ on which Wes-
tern influences appear.11 In addition, a Western artistic
style is paradoxically often used as an instrument of
resistance against the cultural colonialism and impe-
rial domination of the West in different forms of neo-
-traditionalist art. This makes the picture of the local
situation even more complicated. This is also true of
the differentiation of art and the rise of local schools
in the ‘Western style.’
The problems faced by Clark haunt all authors of
art histories in the marginalized regions of the world.
I experienced this myself while writing a history of
art in East-Central Europe after World War II.12 That
particular region remained a part of Europe, although
it was dominated by the Soviet Union. Its art rema-
ined European, although it had limited contact with
Western art. Its artists remained European, although
they were not free to travel, in particular to countries
on the other side of the ‘iron curtain.’ Consequently, if
I had relied on the ‘vertical’ perspective, I would have
been unable to reveal the meaning of artistic culture
in East-Central Europe, which developed differently in
the various countries, although, for instance, geogra-
phically East Berlin was located just steps away from
the West. When writing a history of the region’s art,
I had to focus on the political context of the reception of
Western artistic models, the original meaning of which
was often radically transformed: the informel meant
something different in Poland and in France. The hap-
pening meant something different in Czechoslovakia
and the U.S.A. Conceptual art in Hungary was not the
same as conceptual art in the United Kingdom. Con-
text-building, a kind of ‘framing,’ in the sense given to
this term by Norman Bryson,13 was an indispensable
analytical tool of the art historian in this part of Europe.
In fact, the historical differences and the strong influ-
ence of politics on art have given rise to the thesis, to
quote Hans Belting, of the ‘two voices of the history of
European art.’14 (Paradoxically, political pressure often
resulted in the radical depoliticization of art.) Still, if
this idea is taken too literally, it can lead to errors in
the interpretation of historical processes.15 Art in East-
-Central Europe had a different meaning than it did
in the West, but it continued to develop in the orbit of
Western culture. What is more, this aspiration acted as
a political remedy against the official cultural policies
of the communist regimes. Therefore, the task is not to
present the ‘other voice of art history,’ but to establish
another paradigm for the writing of art history.
Clearly, there is a world of difference between
the history of art in Asia and in East-Central Europe,
particularly when we approach the problem in terms
of the Other. I must disregard here the internal dif-
ferentiation of Asia. The history of the culture of India,
including its assimilation of Western modernist influ-
ences, is quite different from the history of modern art
in Japan. In terms of the ‘exoticization’ of the Other and
its art history, the positioning of Asia differs a great
deal from that of Central or Eastern Europe. The Asian
‘Other’ is a real ‘Other,’ while the Central or Eastern
European Other is ‘not-quite-Other’ or a ‘close Other.’16
Of course, this has not always been the case, which
is clear from Larry Wolff’s study suggesting that to
the people of the Enlightenment someone from Eastern
LV I/2 0 0 8 u m ě n í 379
Piotr Piotrowski . ON THE SPATIAL TURN, OR HORIZONTAL ART HISTORY
Europe (a Lithuanian, a Pole or a Russian) was a ‘real
Other’ indeed.17 In modern culture, however, the place
of the ‘close Other’ is on the periphery of European
culture, outside the center but still within the same
cultural frame of reference. The place of the ‘real
Other,’ by contrast, is determined not by the strategy
of marginalization, but of colonization. The identity of
the ‘real Other’ develops in the tension between its
own, local tradition and the metropolis that colonizes
the area. This difference has consequences for how
the respective Others regard one another. The East-
ern European shares with the Western European an
‘orientalizing’ approach to the ‘real Other,’ taking into
consideration, however, a range of ‘difference.’ The
Asian, by contrast, no matter from which part of Asia
he or she comes, regards Europe as a fairly small and
homogeneous continent. To the Asian, the culture of
Germany, France, Hungary and Poland is all European
culture, with a different degree of potential for expan-
sion. What is more, the Hungarian and the Pole want
to perceive themselves as Europeans and their art as
European. They wanted it particularly badly under the
communist rule; their longing was a psychological
instrument of resistance against the attempts of the
Soviet Union to impose its model of culture on Hungary
and Poland. Asian cultures show no common desire
to refer to a single Asian core. In a sense it is even
the reverse: they all have a sense of far-reaching local
differences, including differences in the reception of
‘Euramerican’ modernity.18
The problem of art history in South America is
slightly different. First of all, this geographical area is
linguistically quite uniform, to such an extent that it
is much easier to regard it as a more or less unified
region, in contrast to the countries of Asia or Eastern
Europe. Even a popular study of South American art
such as Dawn Ades’s Art in Latin America19 only rec-
ognizes national differences in some chapters. The lin-
guistic uniformity is matched by the relatively uniform
ethnic composition of the region. This does not mean,
however, that its culture, including its visual culture, is
uniform as well. Nonetheless, the external geohistorical
circumstances created a frame of reference for the art
of the continent that is different from those operating
in Asia or in Eastern Europe. First of all, however, there
is a view that in South America modern art has been
much more involved in revolutionary politics than it has
in Europe or Asia, while its modernity has been strongly
connected with attempts to develop local identities with
reference to local, ethnic cultural traditions.20 Of course,
just like other areas outside Western centers of modern
art, South America has experienced a mixture of artistic
styles violating the ‘natural,’ that is, Western, order of
art-history chronology. These mutations and the local dif-
ferences in reception of Western art gave rise to original
artistic developments, such as South American surreal-
ism. (The early phase of this movement was particularly
interesting in Mexico.) In fact, despite private contacts
with Breton, this was not really surrealism, but rather
an original, local kind of art. No doubt such phenomena
provoke art historians to revise the traditional Western
frame of reference as well as to recognize the unique-
ness of South American artistic culture, not only with
reference to the West, but also the rest of the world.
380 u m ě n í LV I/2 0 0 8
If global art history is to be written according to
the standards of ‘geohistory,’21 that is, taking into con-
sideration the specific meaning of art of the peripheral
regions, it must be critical of the hierarchical art-his-
tory narratives of ‘vertical’ art history. This means that
it ought to be developed within a different, ‘horizontal’
paradigm.22 Such a global art history should definitely
take advantage of the method of ‘relational geography’
proposed by Irit Rogoff, who defines geography in
terms of cultural differences.23 The geography of cul-
ture conceived in this manner is an attempt to analyze
the relations between the subject and the place where
it functions; in this case both the former and the lat-
ter, art and the region where it is produced, are nei-
ther stable nor fully shaped. On the contrary, both are
created in a dynamic process and in relation to other
regions and subjects, to the local tradition and external
influences. ‘Relational geography’ is a critical geogra-
phy that rejects the essentialist basis of the traditional
Kunstgeographie.
Now I will try to sketch out the program of a ‘hori-
zontal’ art history, or rather ‘horizontal’ art histories,
since as far as I am concerned it is impossible to talk
about one art history opposed to the ‘vertical’ para-
digm. Instead, one must think in terms of pluralistic
art-history narratives.
Perhaps the starting point for the development of
horizontal art histories should be the deconstruction
of the vertical art history, that is, the history of West-
ern art. A critical analysis should reveal the speaking
subject: the one who speaks, on whose behalf and for
whom. This is not to cancel Western art history, but to
call this type of narrative by its proper name, specifi-
cally ‘Western’. In other words, I mean to separate two
concepts, which traditionally have been associated with
one another: Western modern art and universal art. The
former should be relativized and placed – according
to the rules of the horizontal paradigm – next to other
art-history narratives. Consequently, what is, or rather
what should come out of such a move is a reversal of
the traditional view of the relationship between the
history of the art of the Other and the history of ‘our’
(read: Western) art. While it seems obvious that the
modern art of Others developed under the influence
of the West, it appears much less obvious to ask how
developments in non-Western art affect the history of
art in the West or, more precisely, the latter’s percep-
tion. Here a question arises: how does peripheral art
change the perception of the art of the center? Going
one step further, we may also inquire what kind of
picture of the center can be seen not from the center
itself – the place usually occupied by the historian
of modern art – but from a position that is marginal,
according to the principle that one can see much more
from the margins.
First of all, the marginal observer sees that the
center is cracked. While the center perceives itself as
homogeneous, the margins, in the process of receiving
and transforming it for their own use, can see the inner
tensions that belongto their essence. It seems that
there are two categories that homogenize art history
written from the point of view of the center: the canon
and style, in the sense of a given artistic trend such
as cubism, futurism, etc. The history of the art of the
 Piotr Piotrowski . ON THE SPATIAL TURN, OR HORIZONTAL ART HISTORY
periphery, defined in terms of artistic events and the
description and analysis of these events, has developed
in the context of the Western canon and stylistics. First
artists and then art historians refer their creative and
analytical experiences to those categories. The Western
canon of a given trend becomes the point of reference
for its reception and transformation in specific loca-
tions outside the center. This is, however, not so much
a judgmental measure, but rather a historical frame,
a context for the more or less autonomous operations
that, under the pressure of diverse local circumstances,
generate their own hierarchies and canons. Such local
artistic canons cannot be agreed upon, since there is
not a single history of the art of the periphery; there are
as many histories as there are peripheries. Still, such
histories can be negotiated, particularly from the criti-
cal perspective of opposition to the center. If, however,
the canon seen from the periphery becomes relative,
the conclusion is that perhaps it should be relativized
also in the center. Art historians should realize that it
is always an effect of analytical construction and as
such has a historical character that refers more to the
historian than to the art in question.
This process is even more distinct in terms of sty-
listics. In principle, the art of the periphery and its his-
tories never accepted Western ‘purity’ of style. There
are enough examples and analysis of them leads to an
obvious conclusion. Let me just mention Russian cubo-
futurism (its very name is heterogeneous), Hungarian
activism, Polish formism, South American indigenism,
vibrationism, invented by the Uruguayan artist Rafael
Barradas, surrealism, which took many different forms
all over the world, Japanese dada, Latin American con-
crete art and local varieties of conceptualism that most
often differed from the Western (Anglo-American) lin-
guistic model. When we return to the center with the
experience of the periphery, in the case of conceptual
art we realize that in the West it was not so ortho-
dox or homogeneous either. The linguistic model as
an analytical category derived from the activity of the
Art and Language group does not cover a number of
manifestations. I want to say that the history of the art
of the center, and the global history of modern art that
developed out of it, has a chance to revise its self-per-
ception in light of the studies focused on the periphery
–horizontal art history or art histories.
The relativization of the history of Western art as
a result of the deconstruction of its analytical and geo-
graphical categories, as well as the ‘localization’ of the
center, must bring about analogical processes in the
‘other’ art histories. The Other must also take a fresh
look at itself, define its position and the place from
which it speaks. In fact, its position is much more privi-
leged in this respect than that of the narrator placed
at the center. The latter, quite often unconsciously, due
to the ideology of the universalization of modern art,
ignores the significance of place, thus turning into an
instrument of colonization. In his or her opinion, if art
is universal the place from which it speaks does not
matter. The Other, much more sensitive to context and
the importance of ‘relational geography,’ may make us
aware that we do not write our statements in the mid-
dle of nowhere, but rather in specific locations. After
all, the center is also just a place with specific local,
legal, ethnic and cultural parameters. The subject occu-
pying the center forgets that it is there, in a place quite
precisely located on the map of the world. The Other,
which cannot forget its own location, may provide it
with self-consciousness. A historian of modern Argen-
tinean, Czech, or Indian art knows very well where he
or she is, while a historian of modern art in France or
the United States often ignores that knowledge for the
sake of universalizing the local.
At this point we have reached the key problem of
horizontal art history, which is the problem of localiza-
tion. When we take a look at the books on the history of
modern art, we see that on the one hand we have the
‘history of modern art’ with no local specification, while
on the other we have all kinds of adjectives specifying
the regional (e.g., the art of Latin America or Eastern
Europe) or, more often, the ethnic locality (e.g., the
history of Polish, Korean or Mexican art). The prob-
lem of national or ethnic art-history narratives seems
very characteristic of art outside the center, although,
as DaCosta Kaufmann argues, their origin lies else-
where and is much older than the history of modern
art.24 On the one hand, we have national art histories
of particular countries, while on the other hand we
have international art history. In fact, the latter type of
art-history narrative reveals the dynamic of modern art
history:again, on the one hand we have artists with an
international status, although all of them actually come
from specific countries and their art bears the mark of
their national cultures (e.g., Pablo Picasso who came
from Spain). On the other hand there are artists who
remain specifically national, although some of them
were also renowned abroad (e.g., Władysław Strzemiński
as a Polish constructivist). This contrast reveals ten-
sions of a geographical kind: on the one hand we have
Paris and later New York as international centers of
culture; on the other hand we have regional capitals
placed in national frames, such as Prague, Tokyo and
Buenos Aires. Obviously, in the hierarchy of art-history
narratives, the former are highly appreciated, while the
latter are often underrated or ignored.
Of course, that type of locality is related to the
structure of nation states and the modernist form of
nationalism.25 This is now changing on account of
the processes of globalization that are connected in
general to a postmodern view of reality and the trans-
formation of nation states into more cosmopolitan
organizations.26 It seems that the concept of ‘locality’
is no longer bound to a specific place and, according to
Arjun Appadurai,27 it transcends frontiers and borders.
No matter how accurate this observation may be, place
as an identity label has not disappeared. What is more,
it has acquired a new meaning. The lifting of frontiers
and the globalization of art institutions (e. g., the Bien-
nale) on the one hand weakened artists’ ties to place,
while on the other hand it made them paradoxically
even stronger, creating a kind of ‘local identities for
sale.’ The globalized world needs such strategies; it cre-
ates them for commercial and political purposes. This
is the role of cultural brokers, described with reference
to South American art by Mari Carmen Ramirez; they
are curators rather than art historians.28
It is worth while developing this problem a little
bit, and asking about the relationship between the
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Piotr Piotrowski . ON THE SPATIAL TURN, OR HORIZONTAL ART HISTORY
postmodern and the post-colonial understanding of the
‘nation,’ i.e. international and national art history. To
avoid going into details that have been treated exten-
sively by many scholars, let us note that one of the
main issues here is the question of the subject. Gen-
erally speaking, postmodernism stands for a critique
of the subject, a deconstruction and dispersal of the
subject; post-colonial studies operate with the defense
and integrity of the subject.29 The ‘nation’ seen from
a postmodern perspective is deprived of its essential
features. Post-colonial scholarly practice, however,
relies on the essence of the nation to define its criti-
cal strategy and resistance to the center. On the one
hand, in international horizontal art history, operating
with the notion of the ‘nation,’ there must be a defense
of the (national) subject. It is thus closer to the post-
colonial interpretation than it is to the postmodern. On
the other hand, however, shifting the topic of discus-
sion from the international to the national level, one
should have a critical approach to the question of the
essential understanding of the subject. Art produced in
a nation-state is never ‘national,’ either in the ethnic or
the political sense of the word. It would be repressive
to the other groups working within the nation-state,
dominated by the main (ethnic, political) ‘nation’, to
adopt the ‘national’ perspective. Therefore in this situ-
ation it is important to adopt a critical strategy towards
the national (essential) subject in order to gain equality
of rights for all the subjects – nomen omen – working
on the scene. Consequently, horizontal art history writ-
ten from a macro-perspective cannot ignore national
subjects and indeed it has to make a critique of the
center in order to defend them. Horizontal art history
written from a micro-perspective, by contrast, has to
make a critique of the essence of the national subject,
has to deconstruct it, in order to defend the culture of
the ‘Other’ against the national mainstream.
In order to address this issue in detail, I want to
ask another question: what material (in addition to ideo-
logical) premises supported the national constructions
of the history of modern art? I think that what mattered
most was the lack of direct communication between
cultures. If they communicated at all, it was via the
center; this could be observed on the micro and the
macro scale. The cultures of particular regions (Asia,
South America and Eastern Europe) looked up to the
West, rather than looking up to one another. They drew
predominantly from the West, rather than from other
peripheries. The same is true with reference to the indi-
vidual national art-history narratives in specific regions,
even a region as small as Eastern Europe. Poles have
almost no idea about the history of Romanian art; they
ignore it, considering their own culture, which they pre-
fer to compare directly to the West, to be far superior.
Likewise Czechs know little if anything about the his-
tory of Ukrainian art. The Other looks up to the Master
rather than looking up to ‘An-Other,’ thereby accepting,
often quite unconsciously, the hierarchy of the center
of which it is a victim. If there is any transfer of values,
experience or knowledge, it only occurs through the
Master, that is, the West. In this way the Master legiti-
mizes one specific Other in the eyes of ‘An-Other.’
Of course, the relations between the center and
the localities defined in national terms have changed.
382 u m ě n í LV I/2 0 0 8
Modern culture favored the tension between the nation-
al and the international, while contemporary, postmod-
ern, globalized and multiple culture prefers a different
vocabulary, favoring local identity. For the sake of uni-
versalist utopias of unity, modernism ignored individu-
al identities: ethnic, local, sexual, racial and others. The
very adjective ‘international’ implied a state of being
‘inter-,’ ‘beyond’ or ‘above’ all individual and national
features (e. g., the ‘international’ style or stage). That
rhetoric concealed the imperialism of the West, which
could be perceived on the most basic level of language
used by ‘international’ society: first French, then Eng-
lish. The present situation, however, calls for new strat-
egies. As a result of global conflicts and the subsequent
collapse of the universalist utopia, some sort of iden-
tity mark is generally seen as the basic starting point.
Good examples of this new attitude can be seen in the
artistic interpretations of Marina Abramović and Ilya
Kabakov. They regard national origin as important, but
unlike their predecessors they do not frame it in an
‘exotic’ discourse (such as Diego Rivera working in the
United States), nor do they negate the role of influences.
What is more, this tendency favors the reconstruction
of the national origin of many avant-garde ideas, which
was blurred by the paradigm of international modern-
ism. This can be seen in analyses of the work of Marcel
Duchamp in the French context, and Kazimir Malevich
in the context of Russian tradition. Surely, all this is not
brand new, but studies of these two artists in the 1930s,
1940s and 1950s showed little trace of the national
contextualization of their achievements. This was only
acknowledged much later. In this context, one comes
across the idea of transnationality, which is something
quite different from internationality.
The idea of transnationality ought to be used to
develop a horizontal art history,art history that is poly-
phonic, multidimensional and free of geographical hier-
archies. Of course, an open model of global art history
must also include other concepts rooted in perspectives
other than critical geography: those of specific genders,
ethnic groups, subcultures and so on. If fact, such revi-
sions of art history, for instance from a feminist point of
view, have been proposed for many years but often they
still endorse the geographico-hierarchical paradigm of
the history of modern art. We now see transnational art
histories, which negotiate values and concepts along
lines other than the opposition between national and
international; this is clear from the regional art-his-
tory narratives mentioned above. Still, the potential
and the appeal of a transnational discourse offers us
a chance to open art history to a much more interest-
ing perspective; to write a history of art that would
(like the negotiations of local art-history narratives in
specific regions) allow its authors to negotiate local
narratives on a transregional level. This does not have
to lead to writing another art history in a horizontal
form. On the contrary, this strategy should result in
a plurality of transregional narratives, an obvious cri-
tique of the West-centered art-history narrative. This
is a great challenge to our discipline, or at least to the
segment focused on the study of modern art. Just as
a horizontal art history, or histories, should critique the
vertical, centralized model, a world art history should
critique the universal one, the history of imperial art
 Piotr Piotrowski . ON THE SPATIAL TURN, OR HORIZONTAL ART HISTORY
in the literal sense of the term, which imposed on the
colonies the hierarchies, the epistemological catego-
ries and the value system of the metropolis. In other
words: the world art history that has been my subject
Notes
1. This article is the enlarged version of two separate and diffe-
rent papers given to the following conferences: ‘Toward horizontal
art history’ (CIHA Congress, ‘Crossing Cultures. Conflict. Migrati-
on. Converges’, Melbourne 2008); proceedings will be published
by Melbourne University Press 2009), and ‘European avant-garde
and its horizontal art history’ (EAM Conference, ‘Europa! Europa?’,
Ghent 2008). The Polish version of this text is going to publish in
Artium Quaestiones, Vol. XX, Poznań 2009.
2. Hal Foster – Rosalind Krauss – Yves-Alain Bois – Benjamin
H. D. Buchloh, Art Since 1900. Modernism, Antimodernism, Post-
modernism, London 2004.
3. Thomas DaCosta Kaufmann, Toward a Geography of Art,
Chicago – London 2004. – Thomas DaCosta Kaufmann, Time and
Place: Essays in the Geohistory of Art. An Introduction, in: Thomas
DaCosta Kaufmann – Elizabeth Philiod (eds), Time and Place: Es-
says in the Geohistory of Art. London 2005.
4. André Breton, Position politique du surréalisme, Paris 1972,
quoted from František Šmejkal, From Lyrical Metaphors to Symbols
of Fate: Czech Surrealism in the 1930s, in: Jaroslav Anděl (ed.),
Czech Modernism, 1900–1945 (exh. cat.), Houston, The Museum
of Fine Arts 1989, p. 65.
5. Stephen C. Foster (ed.), Crisis and the Arts. The History of
Dada IV. – Gerald Janecek – Toshiharu Omuka (eds), The Eastern
Dada Orbit: Russia, Georgia, Ukraine, Central Europe, and Japan,
New York 1998. Of course, there are other studies focusing on
Eastern Europe in particular as a place of origin of the Dada move-
ment: Tom Sandqvist, Dada East. The Romanians of Cabaret Voltaire,
Cambridge, Mass. 2006.
6. Edward Said, Orientalism, New York 1979.
7. Igor Zabel,‘We’ and ‘The Others,’ in: Eda Čufer – Viktor Mi-
siano (eds), Interpol. The Art Show Which Divided East and West,
Ljubljana – Moscow 2000, p. 132.
8. Suzana Milevska, Is Balkan Art History Global?, in: James El-
kins (ed.), Is Art History Global? New York – London 2007, p. 216.
9. Gerardo Mosquera, The Marco Polo Syndrome. Some Problems
around Art and Eurocentrism, in: Zoya Kocur – Simon Leung (eds),
Theory in Contemporary Art Since 1985, London 2005, pp. 218–225.
10. John Clark, Modern Asian Art, Honolulu 1998.
11. Ibidem, p. 22.
12. Piotr Piotrowski, Awangarda w cieniu Jalty. Sztuka w Europie
Środkowo-Wschodniej w latach 1945–1989, Poznań 2005 (English
edition: London: Reaktion, forthcoming 2009).
matter on this occasion should be horizontal rather
than vertical.
Translated by Marek Wilczyński
13. Norman Bryson, Art in Context, in: Ralph Cohen (ed.), Stud-
ies in Historical Change, Charlottesville 2003, p. 21.
14. Hans Belting, Art History after Modernism, Chicago – Lon-
don 2003, p. 61.
15. See Mária Orišková, Dvojhlasné dejiny umenia, Bratislava
2002.
16. The term‘close Other’ was used by Bojana Pejić in her essay
The Dialectics of Normality, in: Bojana Pejić – David Eliott (eds),
Art and Culture in Post-Communist Europe (exh.cat.), Stockholm,
Moderna Museet 1999, p. 120. She mentions Boris Groys (fremde
Nahe), but makes no bibliographic reference.
17. Larry Wolff, Inventing Eastern Europe, Stanford, Ca. 1994.
18. Clark (see note 10), p. ???
19. Dawn Ades, Art in Latin America. The Modern Era, 1920–
1980, New Haven – London 1989.
20. Ibidem, pp. 125–126, 195–213.
21. DaCosta Kaufmann (see note 3).
22. Piotr Piotrowski, On Two Voices of Art History, in: Kaja
Bernhardt – Piotr Piotrowski (eds), Grenzen überwindend. Fest-
schrift für Adam S. Labuda zum 60. Geburtstag, Berlin: 2006,
p. 53.
23. Irit Rogoff, Engendering Terror, in: Ursula Biemann (ed.),
Geography and the Politics of Mobility, Wien – Köln 2003, p. 53.
24. Thomas DaCosta Kaufmann, National Stereotypes, Preju-
dice, and Aesthetic Judgments, in: Michael Ann Holly – Keith Moxey
(eds), Art History, Aesthetics, Visual Studies, Williamstown, Mass.
2002, pp. 71–84.
25. See Anthony D. Smith, Nationalism and Modernism. A Crit-
ical Survey of Recent Theories of Nations and Nationalism, Lon-
don – New York 1998.
26. Ulrich Beck, Macht und Gegenmacht im globalne Zeitalter.
Neue Weltpolitische Ökonomie, Frankfurt am Main 2002.
27. Arjun Appadurai, Modernity at Large. Cultural Dimensions of
Globalization, Minneapolis 1996.
28. Mari Carmen Ramirez, Brokering Identities: Art Curators
and the Politics of Cultural Representation, in: Reesa Greenberg –
Bruce W. Ferguson – Sandy Nairne (eds), Thinking about Exhibitions,
London – New York 1996, pp. 21–38.
29. See Dariusz Skórczewski, Wobec eurocentryzmu, dekolo-
nizacji i postmodernizmu. O niektórych problemach teorii postkolo-
nialnej i jej polskich perspektywach, Teksty Drugie, 2008, Nos 1–2,
pp. 33–35.
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